There was great expectation worldwide when Gabriel García Márquez announced in 2002, after surviving a serious illness, that the first (and by 2011 only) volume of his memoirs was finally ready for publication. He had decided that the memoirs would have a semi-fictional status, which has delighted most readers but has caused academic critics a series of unusually difficult but also illuminating dilemmas. These begin with the epigraph: ‘Your life is is not the one you lived but the one you remember and how you remember it in order to tell it.’ This statement raises almost every question that can be asked about experience, observation, memory, language, truth and sincerity before the reader has even begun the narrative.

The fact is that, more than most novelists, García Márquez had been writing autobiographically even when he least appeared to be doing so. Excavating his own past had been the principal motivating force of his early writing, and he had been talking about writing his memoirs since the late 1960s, when he first became famous. At that time, weary of the endless series of repetitive interviews to which he was subjected, he began to embellish some of his stories, partly to stave off boredom by amusing himself but also partly, no doubt, to protect his biographical secrets. He would eventually say that his interviews should be considered a part of his creative fiction.